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India produces 80% of the world's turmeric. The spice has been used as medicine, food, and cosmetics for thousands of years across South Asia. In the last decade, demand for supplements made with it has soared in the US because of a compound called kurcumin, only found in turmeric. It's known for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. But Indian farmers haven't been able to cash in partially because most of what they grow isn't that high in curcumin. And their supply chain is so convoluted criminals can sneak in fake turmeric that devalues these crops. When you buy turmeric at the supermarket, you have no idea where it came from. It's changed hands so many times. It's probably a couple of years old. Now, other countries like Fiji are ramping up production, creating a race to grow turmeric with higher levels of curcumin that could be worth more. So, what does it take to make a healthier, more valuable turmeric and is there a way for farmers in India to cash in on western demand? Turmeric is related to ginger, the part of the plant we use is the ryome or the underground stem. And it's really good for you because of that curcumin. And especially if you're cooking with some fat and some black pepper, that combination in particular seems to be really, really powerful. Indians have known this for a long time. The spice has been used as medicine here for at least 4500 years. It's said to help with loads of health issues, including congestion, joint pain, respiratory problems, and even chickenpox. In Sanskrit, turmeric has 53 different names, including mahogany, or killer of fat. and giant meaning victorious over diseases. It was also mixed into perfume used in wedding ceremonies to symbolize blessings cooked into staple dishes across the subcontinent given as an offering to deities in Hindu rituals and thrown during holy celebrations. Ashok Rezu runs this 2acre farm in Telangana, one of the top five tumeric producing states in India. Using pickaxes, workers unear the crop for up to eight hours a day. Because harvesting is so tough, Ashok's had a hard time in recent years finding workers. He's had to increase wages by 50% to attract enough help. After harvesting, Ashuk rents this machine to boil the turmeric. A necessary step if he wants to sell it for powdering. It cost him $140 to rent, which in a bad year could be more than a tenth of his profit. [Music] [Music] The next morning, workers spread out the roots to dry in the sun. They'll leave the turmeric here for up to 15 days, turning it twice a day so it dries evenly. Two people stay with the rootstocks and watch out for rain. Once the tumeric is thoroughly dry, it shrivels up and gets really hard like a piece of wood. Workers then rake it into bowls and dump those into these rotating drums. [Music] [Applause] The drums remove the skin and any dirt and stones left over from the fields. They also make the turmeric pieces smoother and softer as they tumble. Ashok can't sell the roots unless they're polished like this. And it's not just these polishing machines that cost him. Last year, floods and excessive rainfall pummeled close to half a million acres of turmeric and other crops across Andra Pradesh and Telangana. Things like fertilizer have also gotten pricier. Ashuk sinks twice as much money into his land than he did a decade ago. These rising costs have left some farmers like Ashoke facing losses of hundreds of dollars each season, sometimes 20% of their investment. That happened to Ashoke a few years ago. foreign. He managed to stay in business by downsizing his tumeric production while prices were low and growing other crops instead. It doesn't help that he's not growing a very valuable kind of turmeric. He produces erundu which is low in curcumin content. Of the more than 30 varieties of turmeric grown in India, most only have 2% curcumin. But the wellness markets in the west are willing to pay big bucks for at least 5%. However, only a few tumerics in all of India hit that threshold and Ashuk isn't in the right area to grow them. He trucks his harvest to Nisamabad, home to one of the biggest tumeric markets in the country. Over 880,000 lbs of turmeric are sold here daily, except farmers don't sell their spice themselves. A commission agent acts as a middleman, representing lots of farmers at a tumeric auction. Those buyers, known as traders, bid on tons of turmeric and sell it to big processors. Next, factories turn the roottocks into things like turmeric powder, and packagers box it up. Export companies get the spice approved for shipment out of India, and an American import company gets it cleared through customs. Then, another statesside business might repackage it, while yet another handles distribution to grocery stores. Along the way, everyone takes a cut of the profits, leaving the farmers who did most of the work with the smallest share. Commission agents stack the roots up in a pile called a lot and then put it up for auction. These auctions used to happen in person with traders shouting out their bids. But the market modernized the process in 2016, taking it entirely online through a program called enom. Baba Nagla is a trader and processor. He bids at the online auctions, but he still checks the turmeric quality in person. bids are now kept secret until the auction ends to prevent traders from forming cartels and colluding to keep bids low. [Applause] Farmers have no idea what they'll get for their turmeric or where their turmeric will end up. mented industry is one of the reasons there can be huge swings in how much farmers get paid for their crop. It's more volatile than rice or corn. In a good year, Ashok can take home nearly $3,000, but in a bad one, he might make only about a third of that. Some farmers couldn't hold on during the down years. In the early 2000s, the Indian government started farmer producer organizations. These farmer-owned cooperatives could negotiate better prices and cut out the middlemen. The problem is these groups don't pay farmers until they find a buyer for the tumeric, which can take weeks, even months. Middlemen, on the other hand, pay right away, which is why most farmers still go through agents, even if it means making less. Although farmers do much of the work to process it, middlemen keep most of the profit. The traders sell it to processors like the Neil Kant Corporation, which turn it into export ready turmeric powder. Pavan, who also manages this factory, dries the turmeric in the sun a second time because sometimes there's still moisture left in the roottocks. The sticks help workers flip over the tumeric to prevent fungus from growing. This factory can dry 2,000 bags of turmeric at once. Then these workers sore through piles of dried roottocks by hand, removing impurities like stones. The bigger the pieces, the more Pavan can sell them for. The highest quality is usually exported as they can sell it for 10% more, but the inferior ones will still be ground up into powder. Pavan will polish the turmeric yet again in these drums, which increases its value by brightening the color. On average, the factory can polish 35 tons a day. With the cost of all of these steps, Pavan says his company makes slim profit margins. These days, Pavan is grinding more turmeric into powder than ever before because it's selling better than unpowdered. The factory now processes 13,000 tons of turmeric a year. But when it comes to powdered factories are facing steep competition from counterfeits, sometimes smaller processors in less regulated areas of India. [Music] They mix up rice with turmeric. They mix up colors. It is a massive problem. In the 1980s, processors across South Asia began using an industrial paint called lead chromate to make their turmeric more yellow. People will add a leadbased dye to turmeric. Sometimes it seems like they don't even realize that it's dangerous. Uh they're just trying to make their product look better. It's led to millions of lead poisoning cases across the globe, even reaching as far as New York City. And these fraudsters can sell the lace tumeric for cheap, undercutting producers of the real stuff. In response, the Indian government set a lead limit of 10 micrograms per gram of turmeric and increased testing across multiple states. But still, tumeric has been found with more lead than the legal limit. In 2024, the FDA rejected four shipments of Indian turmeric for legal color additives like lead chromate. But Ethan Fr, who runs the spice company Burlap and Barrel, is worried US agencies no longer have the workforce to check imported goods. To check for lead, there's no government oversight at all. We, as the company importing it, take take responsibility for it. Ethan works directly with an organic turmeric farmer in India, paying him over four times the fair trade price. It's very rare for a US company to to buy directly from farmers in any spice, especially turmeric. Mostly American companies will buy through an importer who has bought from an exporter who has bought from a consolidator, you know, like 10 steps back before you get to the farm. But even though Ethan knows exactly where his tumeric comes from, he still checks it for lead. You know, we test everything in India and on arrival for lead and other heavy metals for uh pathogens, ecoli, salmonella, but none of that is required. I I think the government should be much more aggressive uh because companies do take advantage of these loopholes and and consumers are the ones who suffer. And it's not just lead that Indian turmeric has been laced with. It's been found to contain high levels of pesticides. The other problem is when the turmeric is used in the mixed spice. So if you buy a mixed spice where turmeric is there again, you don't know which spice has the problem and it get mixed up. Singapore, Nepal and Hong Kong have placed bans on two companies mixed spices from India. India is such a huge exporter of spices that any ripple in the spice world and affect the Indian economy. India has long traded its turmeric across the globe. Around 700 AD, traders moved the spice along the Silk Road. Its golden hue made it useful for dying fabric and it soon became synonymous with luxury. Marco Polo wrote of its color and taste during his journeys east and the Dutch and British East India companies shipped loads of turmeric to Europe for its medical uses. The British spread it to their colonies across the globe. So turmeric is nothing new to the West. But in the last two decades, US imports have jumped a,000%. The states brought in $50 million worth of the spice in 2023. So what prompted the renewed boom? Compared to a lot of other spices, turmeric has really great medical research around it. There was such a body of research and and tradition and history in India. It it didn't come from nowhere. Studies by European and American scientists eventually proved what India had known all along. Turmeric is really good for you. You know, you see it in tablet form in Costco. You know, it's not surprising that it's popular in the US, but what is surprising is, I guess, the speed with which it it sort of appeared on the market. Celebrities and health influencers hopped on the trend. Americans released health books and cookbooks. Soon, coffee shops were serving up golden lattes, a riff on the traditional Indian home remedy called Dude, and turmeric wellness shots took off. Co created a mass market for these products. Previously, it was more of a niche market. During the pandemic, people began experimenting more cooking at home and were drawn to bright colored turmeric dishes on social media. the color of turmeric, that that gold orange uh really pops. Big multinational companies even swapped out synthetic dyes for the spice. In 2016, Craft replaced the chemical yellow dye in its mac and cheese with turmeric. That same year, General Mills replaced some of the synthetic colorants and trick cereal with the spice. But after uproar from consumers over the less vibrant colors, the company reintroduced the chemically colored version. An extract of tumeric even gives sweet tart ropes their hue. But despite all this rising demand, Indian turmeric farmers still aren't guaranteed a good price because what they grow isn't high enough in valuable kurcumin for US and European pharmaceutical markets because those are the traditional processes. Kurcumin was not a number that was measured. A longer growing cycle contributes to more curcumin. In India, they're not letting it sit in the soil for long periods of time. Uh so that will just by nature mean it has lower curcumin content. Plus the hot water farmers boil it in also likely lowers the content of the compound. We are not able to meet more than the 10% of the global demand for high curcumin content which is actually used by the pharmaceutical and naceutical industry. All of these challenges have left some farmers like a shook earning just 50 cents a pound for their roots. That same turmeric might sell for $15 at a New York City Whole Foods. Indian turmeric is also facing growing competition from other countries. Countries that did not produce turmeric before are now coming up with production. Like Fiji is now coming up with production. About a decade ago, Fiji grew just 4% of the turmeric the US imported. Now it makes up to 25%. Over the same period, India's export share dropped by more than 8%. Unlike in India where it's cultivated on farms, in Fiji the turmeric grows wild. We have been collecting our tumeric from villages up in the foothills of Fiji. So they're fairly remote and they don't really have any other source of income. Tahu Hikaroa and his friend founded Island Magic Fiji to help locals make money off of the abundant turmeric. Because it's wild, villagers don't treat it with pesticides or fertilizers. You can't use fertilizers and pesticides in in Fiji. They're too expensive to start with. The lack of additives is likely one reason this turmeric has higher curcumin levels than in India. The turmeric was bought here over 100 years ago and it's been sitting in the soil just regenerating year on year on year on year. That has naturally just allowed those cumoids to just grow in strength. Plus, the company doesn't boil or polish its roottocks, which can also lower curcumin levels. Because we're exporting fresh, there's no real processing involved at all. The team just washes it in these tubs to remove any dirt and gives it a quality control check. Then they dry it out on mesh racks for up to 7 hours. The high curcumin levels of Island Magic's turmeric may have helped Fiji gobble up more market share in the West. Now Fiji exports over a third of the value of tumeric to the US as India. Despite having less than 1% of the area, it's given the Pacific island nation a leg up. Most of the land in Fiji is native land. The soils are untouched, whereas the farmed arable land in India has been really worked for a long time. 97% of Island Magic's 1.1 million pounds of turmeric end up stateside. There it'll be juiced, freeze-dried, or dehydrated. The more we ship out, the more villages we can bring into our network. South American countries are also hopping on the trend, like here in Colombia, or here in Peru, where exports have surged 70% from 2024 to 2025. Ethan has worked with a farmer in Costa Rica growing turmeric to replant a mountainside that was once deforested for cattle. I visited some turmeric farms in Nicaragua at one point that were being grown at a huge scale at a a coffee plantation that produces for Starbucks. Individual farmers in India. Now they're often being priced out by larger scale producers in other countries. The 26% tariff the Trump administration has threatened to put on Indian imports could impact tumeric farmers too. We don't know the impact but the fact remain is overall tariff in India is lower than many other countries from which they are sourcing their money. While tariffs could spell opportunity for India to earn back market share, producers here will have to contend with their own tariff increases first. It's going to affect the most vulnerable people first and often that's people who've been excluded from global supply chains who don't have direct access themselves. So what can be done to help the tumeric farmers? you need to actually move up into the curcumin content level of the turmeric which is now more important than the uh turmeric in itself. In January 2025, the Indian government launched a new national turmeric board. Farmers hoped it would help develop more curcumin rich varieties and help them negotiate better prices. But there are already regulatory organizations controlling turmeric production in India. Logically speaking, you need a single agency to look after the product. That hasn't happened. Supporters hope the board will help get more of India's 30 turmeric varieties GI tags or geographical indications. These labels guarantee a product's authenticity, which could help increase profits and help deter counterfeits. fully Japan, US or European countries. But can the board actually follow these promises? You are asking me a million dollar question which nobody in India knows. But Arpeta believes India has the ability to do more with its turmeric than just polish and export it. Producers could make turmeric extract, she says, or turn it into value added products like turmeric milk supplements and snacks that can fetch higher prices globally. I'm not worried about farmer has stopped producing turmeric. I'm more worried about how can the farmer move up the value chain because farmers are the most important piece of this billiondoll ancient and for many sacred spice. One that locals here hope will bring them prosperity and protection spread across their doorstep.